I am writing a web application using ring and clojure. I am using the jetty adapter for the development server and emacs/SLIME for IDE. While wrap-reload does help, run-jetty blocks my slime session and I would like to be able to start/stop it at will without having to run it in a separate terminal session. Ideally, I would like to define a server agent and functions start-server and stop-server that would start/stop the server inside the agent. Is this possible?
The Jetty documentation has some information on graceful shutdown of Jetty. That's probably not enough information but it may get you started.
I haven't started playing with compojure yet, but overall I prefer to work with Tomcat. It's more full-featured; among other things, there is a well-documented API for starting it up and shutting it down, it listens for the shutdown command on a dedicated port; there are ant
tasks to do this, and they could of course be called from a Java app as well. I just don't know what kind of magic Compojure does with connecting the REPL to a running instance of the Web container, and if/how automatic class reloading happens... hopefully someone else will be able to provide more information.
I usually have a line in my Ring app that looks like the following:
(defonce server (run-jetty #'my-app {:port 8080 :join? false}))
This prevents locking up the REPL. It also allows me to recompile this file without worrying that my server will get redefined. It also lets you interact at the REPL like so:
user=> (.stop server)
and
user=> (.start server)